


Battle

by orphan_account



Category: Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-22
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-12-09 05:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/770384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Because Tanya Moodie. *swoon*</p></blockquote>





	Battle

Here in her new job, her new life, there are charts. Checklists. She gathers yeses and nos from her clients, inputs them into forms, announces the spat-out diagnosis.

The diagnosis is usually shit. She doesn’t tell them that, the clients. Wouldn’t do.

All the same: shit. Take Watson. John. PTSD? Never; Ella knows a fellow chaos addict when she sees one. The bastard misses what broke him.

Just like her.

She can’t tell him that, though. Protocols. Procedures. She has to say what the tests say, and the tests say PTSD, so: PTSD it is.

Ella can smell the Beast, sometimes, when she walks into her office first thing. They were made for each other: hunter and hunted, pursuer and pursued. Tale-tellers. Balance-keepers. Her hand twitches for her spear at the rank scent, craves her ancient enemy.

She doesn’t know, she thinks, how to be harmless. Ella-the-centered. Ella-the-safe.

_Ella._

She still feels like Hunter.

She was deadly, once. Was a honed edge. Then: the moment for which she had ten thousand times prepared, had ten thousand times triumphed.

And yet.

This is her punishment for failure: this silence. This sitting near to warrior after warrior, their stories beating bloody in every word they don’t speak, unable to tell them that she knows, she _knows,_ what it is to thrive in battle.

**Author's Note:**

> Because Tanya Moodie. *swoon*


End file.
